Phonology 3

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Phonology 3

Summary
In this input we will be dealing with the major elements of intonation. We will be looking at
the basic tones and the way that these express or reflect certain other language categories,
such as grammar, discourse etc. Through this analysis we will investigate some different
ways in which intonation can be viewed. We will go on to consider whether intonation
should be taught, and considered practical teaching ideas and materials.

Objectives
By the end of this input you will:

 Have an awareness of the importance of intonation.

 Have knowledge of what intonation actually consists of.
 Have knowledge of the basic patterns of intonation.
 Have a basic knowledge of the structural, functional, attitudinal and discoursal roles of
intonation.
 Have considered some of the objections to making the rules of intonation explicit to
students, in the light of the Lingua Franca Core.
 Have considered some practical ideas and materials on how to enable the learner to
recognise and produce the correct intonation patterns in appropriate contexts.
 Have had experience of evaluating materials designed both to raise awareness of
intonation and to practise how to use it correctly.

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Contents

1. Introduction
2. A Definition of Intonation
3. The Terms of Intonation
3.1. Pitch and Range
3.2 Tone and Movement
3.3 Tone Units
3.4. Onset and Tonic Syllables
3.5. Rhythm
4. Basic Rules and Patterns of Intonation
4.1. Grammatical
4.2. Functional and Attitudinal
4.3. Discoursal
5. Intonation and the Lingua Franca Core
6. Conclusion
7. Terminology Review
Reading

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1. Introduction
Intonation is an area which many teachers feel insecure with. We have probably all hesitated
and wondered if we can correctly identify whether an utterance is rising or falling.
Intonation in particular is one of the most challenging phonological areas to understand. As
we shall see, there are different views as to how much detail we as teachers should go into
in focusing on intonation, if any at all. Some theorists believe the scale of exceptions and
variables involved make this area unteachable, whilst others believe it is quite possible to
identify basic rules and patterns which we can usefully show to students.

You will recall that so far in the course materials you have looked at the following:

 Phonology 1: Sounds
 Phonology 2: Features of Connected Speech

In Phonology 3 we will add intonation, the third component of phonology. This is not to say
that intonation is third in importance. Intonation is, for example, closely linked to grammar
and even more closely linked to discourse. More to the point, many people believe it has
profound importance for attitude and meaning, and that it can even be seen as the major
carrier of meaning. For example, it is a key component of sarcasm and irony; if we leave a
building without an umbrella and it is pouring with rain we might jokingly say ‘Oh great!’
with a flat and unenthusiastic intonation. We might equally use the same words ironically
with a falsely enthusiastic intonation. The conveying of extreme emotions can depend very
much on intonation. Intonation is even independent of language itself. If we see something
we like very much we might say no words at all, just ‘Mmm!’ Everyday life is full of
conversations in which intonation carries messages of the utmost subtlety; the slightest hint
of movement up or down in intonation is powerful enough to alter meaning.

2. A Definition of Intonation
Thornbury describes intonation thus:

Intonation has been called the ‘music’ of speech. It is the meaningful use that
speakers make of changes in their voice pitch. Intonation is a suprasegmental
feature of pronunciation, meaning that it is a property of whole stretches of
speech rather than of individual segments (such as phonemes) […] Many

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theories have been advanced as to the function of intonation, and the kinds of
meaning it expresses. The main candidates are:
 Grammatical functions, such as indicating the difference between
statements and questions;
 Attitudinal function, such as indicating interest, surprise, boredom and so
on […]
 Discoursal function, such as contrasting new information with
information that is already known, and hence shared between speakers
Current theories tend to favour the last of these […] It serves both to separate
the stream of speech into blocks of information […], and to mark information
within these blocks as being significant. In English, there is a strong association
between high pitch and new information.
(Thornbury, S. 2006 An A-Z of ELT Macmillan, pp110-111)

3. The Terms of Intonation

In this section we will define the main terms used in the description of intonation.

3.1. Pitch and Range

Pitch means really what it means in the everyday phrases: ‘high-pitched’ and ‘low-pitched’.
(Remember that it has nothing to do with whether the voice is loud or soft, fast or slow).
Pitch is the relative level of speech sounds perceived by the listener.

Pitch range therefore is the distance between a speaker’s customary top and bottom note,
like the range of an opera singer, for example. Note that pitch range is not just a feature of
an individual’s speech. It can apply to languages too. Some languages have a wide pitch
range: English is notably wide, as is Chinese but other languages have a narrower pitch range
e.g. Spanish, or German. If you have experience of teaching Spanish, Italian or Arabic L1
learners you may already be aware of the challenges of widening these learners’ pitch range.
Many people might initially assume this should be the other way round but in fact it is
English, not Italian that is an ‘up and down’ language. The first thing the English learner of
Italian has to do is to flatten his range, while the Italian learner of English needs to widen
hers. On the other hand, if you have experience of teaching Brazilians you may/will know
that they share the wide pitch range of English speakers.

3.2. Tone and Movement

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A tone is a movement of pitch: In any tone the pitch could be high, mid or low. There are
various tones:

 Rise
 Fall
 Fall-Rise
 Rise-Fall

The movement could be rise , or fall, or it could be rise-fall or fall-rise . So a
tone could be a high rise or a low rise, it could rise from a high position (high rise - relatively
less movement) or rise from a low position (low rise - relatively more movement) or a high
fall or a low fall. That is, it could fall from a high position or from a low position.

For more on this, see Wells, J. C. 2006 English Intonation CUP, Chapter 2.

3.3. Tone Units

Spoken language can be divided into tone units. These are chunks of language, broken up
rather like phrases in written English, for example:

 If you finish quickly leave the room. (The lack of comma is intentional here)

This can be chunked in 2 ways, depending on context.

a) If you finish / quickly leave the room

b) If you finish quickly / leave the room

If you look at the following utterances, again there are different ways of dividing
them up into tone units.
 The man and the woman in the red car had an accident on the way home.
There could be either 3 or 4 tone units here. It depends on how many people are in the
red car.
The man /and the woman in the red car/ had an accident / on the way home.
The man and the woman in the red car /had an accident / on the way home.

 Steve said the chef was brilliant.

There could be 2 or 3 tone units here. It depends on who is brilliant.

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Steve said / the chef was brilliant.

Steve / said the chef / was brilliant.

3.4. Onset and Tonic syllables

Gerald Kelly (in How to Teach Pronunciation, Longman, 2000, p3) reminds us that
utterances are made up of syllables.

 The syllable which carries the main stress and where the main pitch movement in an
utterance takes place is the tonic syllable (sometimes also called the tonic or the
nucleus, and a term for this phenomenon is nuclear stress).
 The stressed syllable before the tonic syllable is called an onset syllable.

So in the following example:

On MONday it RAINED.

a) MON is the onset syllable, which is conventionally shown in capitals.

b) RAINED is the tonic syllable which is conventionally shown in capitals and underlined,
and which is where the main pitch movement (in this case fall )occurs.

In each tone unit, there is one tonic syllable and pitch movement. The example above is one
tone unit.

3.5. Rhythm
In the section on features of connected speech, we noted that English tends to have what is
called a stress timed rhythm. In such a rhythm the stressed syllables are particularly stressed
and a varying number of unstressed syllables. It could be one, it could be as many as five or
more and they are packed into the intervals. This results in distortions, compressions and
weakening of the weak syllables. Rhythm (or speech rhythm as the Longman Dictionary of
Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics terms it) consists of a pattern of pulses of air
pressure. In English in particular, the regularity of the rhythm of these is related to meaning:
significant words or syllables in the utterance are where these pulses appear. For example,
in:
 No! I certainly won’t!
The words in bold are the ones where these pulses appear.

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As a means of putting terms from this section into practice, look at the dialogue below. Two
people in a cafe notice a new waiter:

Customer A: I haven’t seen him before!

Customer B: No, he must be new. He’s a bit slow, isn’t he?
Customer A: Yes, but he’s probably still learning the ropes.

If we identify the most likely prominent (stressed) syllables, divide the exchange into tone
units and consider which is the most likely tonic syllable in each utterance, we might end up
with the following.

Customer A: I haven’t seen HIM before!

Customer B: NO/ he must be NEW/ He’s a bit SLOW,/ ISN’T he?
Customer A: YES/ but he’s PRObably /still learning the ROPES.

The most likely prominent (stressed) syllables are highlighted in bold, suggested tone units
are denoted by a ‘/’ and the most likely tonic syllables in each utterance are written in
capital letters.

4. Basic Rules and Patterns of Intonation

So far we have established no rules. We have simply seen that various things happen. But of
course they do not happen by chance. Intonation has its own rules, however nebulous they
may appear. It can rise, fall, fall-rise, rise-fall and so on. But what do these patterns
correspond to? There are various correspondences between intonation and other language
systems, most importantly:

 Grammatical
 Functional
 Attitudinal
 Discoursal

Of course, the rules we establish are not always reliable: Kelly says that the ‘links [of
intonation] with specific grammatical constructions or attitudes can only be loosely defined’
and furthermore, ‘grammatical and attitudinal analyses of intonation can offer no hard and
fast rules.’ (Kelly, G. 2000 How to Teach Pronunciation, Longman p87). But recall that we

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are dealing with rules of language here rather than rules of physics. Language is not a
rational system so we need not be dismayed by the idea that rules are not always consistent.

We will now look at how intonation functions and what patterns it displays within each
language system.

4.1. Grammatical
Here (nonetheless!) are some such rules:
 Statements tend to go down: ‘He lives in London.’ 
 Imperatives tend to go down: ‘Shut that door!’ 
 Yes/No questions tend to go up: ‘Is she there?’ 
 Wh questions tend to go down: ‘Where’s he gone?’ 
 Question tags seeking confirmation tend to go down: ‘It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?’ 
 Question tags that are only 50% sure tend to go up: ‘The exam’s on Tuesday, isn’t it?’ ’
(or is it Wednesday?)
 Lists of items tend to rise on each of the items until the last when the intonation falls:
Think of this sentence: ‘I went to the supermarket and I got some bread, cheese,
pickle and some mineral water .’ There is a fall on water. Note, however, that if
your list tails away unfinished there is not this final fall. Indeed the options appear to be
still open. For example, if I come to your house and you offer me a drink you might say
‘There’s tea, coffee  or juice .’ If to this list I replied ‘Have you got any herbal
tea?’, it could be considered that you are being rather awkward. If, on the other hand,
you had given me an unfinished list with a rise on the final item (‘…or juice… ?’, I could
perhaps be permitted to order ‘off menu’.

4.2. Functional and Attitudinal

As you know, functions are language or speech acts: for example, inviting, advising and
complaining are all functions. The question is whether there are connections that can be
made between functions and intonation. The problem here is that functions do not in
themselves express attitude. Intonation is an essential component in functional exponents
but it would be difficult to find a correlation between a functional category and any one
intonation pattern. After all, the same function can be fulfilled in a variety of ways. For
example a parent might say to a teenager:

‘Look, just do your bloody homework!’

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Or

‘Isn’t it time you got round to doing that homework for tomorrow, darling?’

So, it is therefore not the function that intonation conveys but rather the nuances of
attitude. Indeed by and large intonation expresses the attitudinal aspect of a particular
functional exponent.

Here are some of the major attitude-intonation connections:

 Expressing surprise: fall-rise: did you? 

 Expressing interest: rise 
 Expressing enthusiasm: high fall 
 Giving polite advice: fall at the end of utterance 
 Criticising tactfully: low fall 

If you are interested in looking into this in more detail, Wells (op. cit.) provides a very
thorough summary of attitude-intonation connections.

4.3. Discoursal
In the 1980s and 90s, there developed a more discoursal approach to intonation known as
discourse intonation (After Brazil, D., Coulthard, M. & Johns, C. 1980 Discourse Intonation in
Language Teaching Longman; Brazil, D. 1997 The Communicative Value of Intonation in
English CUP). This was a novel system consisting of fewer and simpler constituents than
previous analyses. It is also a more coherent system, and encapsulates intonation succinctly.

Before looking at discourse intonation we perhaps need to remind ourselves of the meaning
of discourse. At its most simple level, discourse is any piece of language above the sentence
level. Discourse, be it spoken or written, is held together by markers indicating shifts of
focus, references backwards and forwards and changes of topic. We have simply to say the
word ‘anyhow’ in conversation, for example, and we are signing a change in gear, signalling,
perhaps, that we are closing some issue and moving on. And intonation also helps flag up
these shifts. If we say:

‘Forget about John , what about….’

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We are signalling that we are going to talk about someone else. If we say: ‘Well, apparently
….’ we are probably marking the announcement of a bit of gossip. We have already
seen that an intonationally closed or open list of options (tea, coffee …?) has
significantly different meanings. Brazil, in The Communicative Value of Intonation in English
and earlier books, analysed the discoursal role of intonation more methodically. His findings
are usefully summarised in Kelly, G. 2000 How to Teach Pronunciation Longman, pp101-102
if you would like to read further on this topic.

The term ‘proclaiming tone’ refers to an intonation pattern that either rises and then falls, or
just falls. It shows that the speaker is giving new information. ‘Referring tone’ on the other
hand, falls and then rises. This refers to an intonation pattern which shows that the speaker
is referring to something that everybody already knows.

Compare the pronunciation of the name ‘Rob’ in each of the following utterances.

‘When you get to the office, you’ll see a tall man called Rob.’
‘When you see Rob, give him the file.’

In the first utterance, there is a falling tone on Rob. The speaker is expressing information
that is presumed to be new, or adding something to the discussion (so a proclaiming tone).
In the second utterance, the tone is fall/rise – a referring tone, as the speaker is referring to
information that is presumed to be shared.

(Examples from Pronunciation from Advanced Learners of English Brazil CUP 1996)

5. Intonation and the Lingua Franca Core

As we saw in Phonology 1 in the course materials, there has in the last ten years been a
move towards a simplified phonological syllabus for learners. Barbara Seidlhofer and
Jennifer Jenkins, principally, advocate a form (or forms) of English which allow for successful
communication between non-native speakers whilst not insisting on non-essential aspects of
the language which do not affect meaning. One of the features of phonology which is not
necessary to spend a lot of time perfecting is, Jenkins’ research has proven, intonation. For
a start, the nuances involved in intonation are myriad, and it would take an inordinate
amount of classroom time to familiarise students with all the shades of meaning it can carry,
let alone expect students to be able to reproduce them. Furthermore, it has been shown

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that native speakers do not follow the ‘rules’ of intonation explored earlier. With this in
mind, Jenkins says:

…even experienced teachers regularly have problems in identifying pitch direction

and often find that when they attempt to model a pitch pattern, it becomes
unnatural or even wrong. And if teachers have problems when pitch is brought to
the conscious level, there does not seem to be much hope for the success of their
students in terms of the overt teaching of pitch.

Jenkins, J. 2000 The Phonology of English as an International Language Oxford University

Press, p153

It would appear, then, that intonation is not to be viewed as essential if we teach English as
a Lingua Franca. What does have importance is where the tonic stress falls, however, which
Jenkins suggests is key in carrying meaning. They bought a new car is very different in
meaning to They bought a new car, for instance.

6. Conclusion
Highlighting/identifying complex intonation patterns is difficult for learners and teachers and
it is tempting to neglect intonation. However, it is possible to identify certain trends and
these can have an important impact on communication.

So:
 Integrate a focus on intonation into your teaching of grammar, functions etc. A focus on
intonation can make revision of a structure interesting and challenging.
 Exaggerate and encourage when modelling and practising intonation.
 Distinguish between activities focusing on recognition and production.
 Keep it simple. A focus on widening voice range will probably be more effective than
putting lots of energy into very specific intonation patterns.
 In focusing on a specific pattern, make the link between form (the intonation) and
meaning (its effect) clear.
 Concentrate on patterns relevant to your learners.
 Focus on stress and rhythm together, intonation does not exist in a vacuum.
 Contrast can be extremely useful for awareness raising, both between good and bad
models, and with monolingual classes, between L1 and English.

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 Mimicry and shadowing can be useful productive practice techniques, it is often difficult
to hear/produce intonation naturally in isolation from a model.

7. Terminology Review

The terms below all refer to aspects of intonation. Can you identify what is being defined?
There is an example provided.

Example: Tonic syllable

The tonic syllable is the most prominent syllable within an utterance which carries the
main stress.

1. Pitch

2. Range

3. Tone Unit (or Tone Group)

Suggested Answers
1. Pitch is the level of the voice as perceived by the listener, either ‘high’, ‘mid’ or ‘low’.

2. Range (or Voice range) is the distance between the lowest pitch of a language and the
highest. The range of English is very wide; other languages less so.

3. Tone unit (or Tone Group) a sub-division of an utterance which contains a tonic syllable.
Tone units are usually represented by slanted lines as in ‘She got here / just after 8.00
o’clock.’ This utterance comprises two tone groups. Longer pauses are sometimes
indicated by double slanted lines.

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Reading:
Although not essential to your Module 1 preparation, if you would like to explore this area
further we suggest the following:

Suggested Reading
Kelly, G. 2000 How to Teach Pronunciation Longman

Roach, P. 2001 Phonetics OUP

Additional Reading
Bradford, B. 1988 Intonation in Context Cambridge University Press
Brazil, D. 1997 The Communicative Value of Intonation in English Cambridge
Kenworthy, J. 1987 Teaching English Pronunciation Longman
Underhill, A. 1994 Sound Foundations Heinemann University Press
Wells, J. C. 2006 English Intonation CUP

Classroom Teaching Materials

Bradford, B. 1988 Intonation in Context Cambridge University Press
Vaughan-Rees, M. 1994 Rhymes and Rhythm (Intermediate) Prentice Hall
O’Connor, J. D. & Fletcher, C. 1989 Sounds English Longman
Haycraft, B. 1994 English Aloud 1 & 2 Heinemann
Bowler, B. & Parminter, S. 1992 Headway Pre-Intermediate Pronunciation Oxford University
Press
Bowler, B. & Cunningham, S. 1990 Headway Intermediate Pronunciation Oxford University
Press
Bowler, B. & Cunningham, S. 1991 Headway Upper Intermediate Pronunciation Oxford
University Press

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